And Then There Were Nuns (14 page)

His arms were really flapping now. “I studied Vatican II, and there is nothing in there about contraceptives.”

“Then why is this an issue?” I asked. “If the abortion campaign by the church has been so prolonged and vociferous, why hasn't it worked? And if contraception isn't in Vatican II, then how come the church won't promote it as a way to stem abortions?”

“Secular politics,” he said, peering at me over his filmy glasses. “That's the problem. Government has put money into abortion counseling, but they haven't put any money into pro-life counseling. Governments are in the business of killing: birth control, abortion, eugenics, euthanasia, war. They're handing out condoms to ten-year-old boys, for heaven's sake. Gosh, when I was ten I wouldn't know what to do with a condom.”

Father Nicholas was distrustful of politicians, and he expressed reservations about Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism. “And Cherie Blair is
RC
, but she campaigns on the pro-choice side.” Among traditional Catholics, the two were pariahs.

Father Nicholas liked his religion and his politics clean, simple, and unwavering.

“That's one of the problems I have with Anglicanism,” he said. “You can never get a straight answer on anything. At least with the Catholics you know where you stand. The Anglicans are all over the map. They debate the theology ad nauseam; everything to them is open to interpretation. By doing that you have nothing to hold on to, nothing to firmly stick in the ground.”

“Is that why you converted to Catholicism?” I asked.

“The constant back-and-forth debate on things was a big factor. I'm all for debate, but it's become insane. It's like, like...”—Father Nicholas had become exasperated, and he sputtered and swung his arms trying to find the right words—“... like the whole institution is run by a committee of academics! Everyone has an opinion, and no one has the guts to make a firm declaration.”

“Exactly!” I blurted, stabbing the air with my finger. “I've felt the same way for ages. What is it with Anglicans that makes them that way?”

Father Nicholas exhaled loudly and shook his head. The Anglican Church/Church of England can drive you so mad with frustration that you want to quit. Debates can and do last decades and generations. When a decision does get made, it is written with spectacular vagueness, leaving the decision open to further debate. Even in name, the church is a glaring indication of an institution-wide inability to reach consensus. The church is variously referred to as the Anglican Church, the Church of England, and the Episcopal Church. They are all autonomous churches linked to the Anglican tradition, but there is only a hazy central, universal authority and leader. Meanwhile, go to England, the States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, China, Poland, and you will find the Roman Catholic Church rendered as the Roman Catholic Church. Everywhere. Woody Allen once quipped, “The Roman Catholic Church is the only true ‘The' church.”

Evidence of Anglicanism's flimsy foundation was all around. The day before, while out for a walk, I had wandered into the churchyard of the forlorn-looking Church of the Holy Cross in the village of Binstead. There was no information to be found on the history of the place, and the so-called welcome board did not so much as list the name of the priest. All contact information had been redacted except for a line saying that there was a service at eight on Sunday morning. There was no sign indicating that the church even belonged to the Church of England—I learned that later from the Catholics at Quarr. In fact, I would find similarly redacted signs on several Anglican churches throughout Ryde during my stay on the island. Why was this happening?

For a faith that was essentially born out of a tyrant's temper tantrum, Anglicanism has evolved into one of the most flexible of mainstream religions. Indecisive for sure, but also generally tolerant. Still, the Anglican Church seemed to be afflicted with a self-sabotaging gene, and it was worrying me.

The more I thought about the words of Fathers Nicholas and Luke, the more it raised my doubts about Anglicanism. Was it better to belong to a strict faith in which you quietly bent the rules, or belong to a flexible faith with rubbery rules?

I thought more deeply about my own experience as an Anglican. Many of the Anglican priests of my acquaintance
were
like academics: distracted, unhelpful, and afflicted with a strong sense of nose-in-the-air superiority. Of the twenty-five or so clergy I have personally known, all but three or four had been insufferable snobs, so much so that it was the pompous attitude of its priests, not the fuzzy doctrine itself, that was driving away me and others from the church. I once overheard a priest denigrate another parishioner behind the parishion-er's back for the heinous crime of pronouncing Magdalen College as
mag-da-lin
rather than the obtuse pronunciation of
mawd-lin.
Who does that?

Wait a minute: What the hell was going on? My spiritual journey was supposed to be about becoming a nun, and here it was being hijacked by religion and semantics. Was this where I, a cradle Anglican, was being led? To switch teams? Or was my desire to be a nun more about finding Christian authenticity? I wanted religion without the busyness, the bitchiness, and the bullshit, but the only places that seemed to offer pure, unadulterated spiritual nourishment were convents and monasteries.

( 3:vii )

QUARR'S MONASTIC
day began at five-thirty with vigils, but as Father Nicholas so keenly pointed out when I first arrived, it was doubtful I would be putting in an appearance at that hour.

My own monastic day started with lauds at seven o'clock.

Lauds means praise, and of all the offices, it is the one that most brims with positivity. Lauds and compline were my favorite offices, the bookends of my day. I loved the chants at compline and the psalms at lauds. While compline acted as a lullaby, lauds was my wake-up call, coaxing my senses into consciousness like fragile young plants shaking off the morning dew.

As the monks prayed Psalm 97, which exhorts, “Shout to the Lord all the earth, ring out your joy,” the pale winter sun streamed through the amber glass windows of the abbey church, igniting the day.

I often headed out for a walk after breakfast. I was girded with an explorer's enthusiasm, not quite sure where I was heading or for what reason but thrilled nonetheless to be in new and unfamiliar surroundings. It's true: it is easier to see beauty in the world when you don't have to slog for a living each day, when you no longer have to worry about your every output being constantly analyzed and judged. My mind cycled back to the workplace I had recently left, and I thought,
Yup, I'd rather be praying.

I turned left onto a mud-packed lane, where Shetland ponies munched contentedly in a paddock and a pair of large sheep presided in another, and past the ruined remnants of a previous incarnation of Quarr Abbey.

Quarr took root here in 1132, when a small but plucky band of Benedictine monks from Savigny, Normandy, were dispatched by their abbot to the Isle of Wight to build an abbey. The man with the deep pockets for this endeavor was Baldwin de Redvers, earl of Devon and a lord of the island, who believed that funding an abbey and eventually being buried in it would guarantee the everlasting veneration of his soul.

But there are no guarantees in life. Not for de Redvers, not even for Quarr. After four hundred years of tilling the island's soil, the monks were forced to disperse when Henry VIII's reformation banned religious orders and torched their monasteries and convents. Some of Quarr's monks fled across the Solent to the monasteries of neighboring English shires; some went back to Catholic France; others surrendered their vocations entirely. But France held no enduring stability, either. Four hundred years later the monks were on the move again when France took up the sword of religious intolerance. Oddly enough, it happened at the same time that a tolerance for religious orders was on the upswing in England. The changing social tide prompted Prosper Guéranger, the founder of the Solesmes order in France, to round up his monks and up-sticks back to the Isle of Wight in 1901.

There was not much left of old Quarr Abbey when they returned. In 1891, rough archeological excavations on the site showed a monastery that accommodated many monks, a sizeable church, a guest lodge, and an infirmary that served the island's population. The excavation also unearthed three stone coffins, one thought to contain the remains of de Redvers and his wife.

I strolled among these dilapidated medieval walls and foundations, most of them virtually obscured by dense, tangled mounds of vegetation. In one wall a shoot had taken root in some deep cavity, miraculously persevering through the stone and mortar until it burst into the sunlight and air.
How does a tender shoot get the confidence and strength to penetrate a wall of stone?

My walk took me far beyond the precincts of the abbey grounds and into an area of almost supernatural beauty: thick ropey vines the size of boa constrictors encircled massive tree trunks; a fine coating of lichen made everything appear somewhat reptilian; vines grew everywhere—up utility poles, through barbed wire, and around tree limbs until the foliage was almost indistinguishable from its host. Everything was linked, attached, connected to something else. Once again, Nature prompted self-interrogation:
Could I ever attach myself to anything that firmly and surrender to its power so that my personality and my very spirit were completely neutralized? Is that what it is like living in a monastic community?

Back in my teenage days, when the idea of being a nun had first launched itself, the notion of melting into anonymity had not seemed like a big deal. Forty years later, it was. My ego had been toughened by decades of jostling and clawing for supremacy—to get the laugh, to offer the quick idea, to have the smart answer, to gain the upper hand in an argument. It was all competition. Everywhere I turned, my ego was on call. I'd had to thrust and fight for a place in line, for a parking spot, for an appointment, for recognition, for compassion, for love. It was exhausting, but not having to do it anymore, admittedly, was like a descent into nihilism. When the ego dies, what's left?

( 3:viii )

MY EGO
was showing no signs of wanting to be put out to pasture, at least not yet. I had been at Quarr only a few days, but already I had taken to strolling the grounds with a proprietary air and drawing up a list of suggested improvements to the abbey:

• move the tea room to the space across from the bookshop to boost bookshop traffic and revenue
  
• improve signage to the bookshop
  
• develop a proactive recruitment strategy that includes outreach in the schools to make young men (and women) aware of religious vocations
  
• devise weekend or week-long retreats geared specifically to men
  
• switch from whole milk to semi-skimmed to improve the monks' waistlines and cholesterol levels
  

Before I could present my ideas to Father Nicholas—and I'm sure he would have been delighted to receive them—new guests arrived at the abbey. The flurry of activity had a tendency to throw Father Nicholas into a tizzy as he organized accommodations and hasty orientation, so I wisely set aside the list.

One of the guests was an elderly priest from Scotland on his yearly retreat, and the others were a father and son from England.

The father, who looked to be in his early sixties, had a full head of white hair and bushy, wiry white eyebrows. He had a kind, cheery face with rosy cheeks, and that expressive and educated chatty English voice—heavy on those aural antioxidants—that puts you in good humor. He was attired in the uniform of a country squire: dark green wool sweater, corduroy trousers, and tweed jacket.

He and his wife had seven children, he told me—“blessed with seven children” were his exact words—and he had been to Quarr many times on retreats but this was his first visit with his son. He looked lovingly at his son and draped a fatherly arm around his shoulder. The son, I guessed, was the reason for the visit. He was a sorry sight: late twenties perhaps, disheveled, with greasy fair hair, bad teeth, a jaundiced complexion, tattered clothes, and an almost catatonic expression. Crack cocaine? Depression? Definitely something dire.

I was touched by this pair, especially by the father: there was something courageous—or maybe it was desperate—about the love he had for his son, as well as the wisdom to bring him to a place like Quarr. I hoped the place would work its magic on them both.

The following morning after lauds, I sauntered into the guest refectory to help myself to a bit of breakfast. The Scottish priest was there, as was the father (the son, I gathered, was sleeping in). There was also a new face at the breakfast table—a man, perhaps in his forties, with dark hair, a short beard, and a pleasant open face.

“Good morning, Jane!” he said brightly.

After days of anonymity, it was unusual to hear my name spoken.

“And you are...?” I asked tentatively.

“Benedict. Oblate.”

Ah, yes. Father Luke had mentioned that someone named Benedict would be working in the bookshop that day.

We chatted a bit. Benedict lived on the island and had been associated with Quarr for about twenty-five years, but only in the last year had he become an oblate. Oblates are men and women who commit to living a simple life in the spirit of St. Benedict and who support monks and nuns in various ways, such as helping with administrative work, landscaping, or in the bookshop.

I had just poured cereal into my bowl and was reaching for the milk when Benedict leaned toward me and murmured, “So, no sex today? None.”

Or was that “Nun”? Whatever he said, it brought all my internal organs, cells, and nerve endings to a screeching halt. I pretended to be unfazed by the remark as I turned to face him and asked, “Pardon?” The register of my voice went up a few octaves, and there was an unfortunate edge to it.